Systems for ordering products and/or services over the Internet and then making payment via the Internet are known. Many of these conventional systems involve identifying credit or debit card numbers such that funds may be obtained from a bank in a manner substantially similar to conventional credit card transactions.
A system for instructing payment to be made via mobile telephone text messages is described in United States patent application publication No. 2007/0203836 A1, published Aug. 30, 2007. This provides an alternative method of payment that may be considered more secure than entering credit card details into a networked computer system, but it has a disadvantage in that it requires a set up procedure in order for the method to be deployed.
An alternative approach is described in United States patent application publication number 2009/0006217 A1, published Jan. 1, 2009, which was filed Jun. 29, 2007 and assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/824,607. This process has been successfully deployed and is trading under the service mark “MOBILLCASH.” The MOBILLCASH system allows an order to be placed over the Internet and for funds to be transferred by transmitting a plurality of premium rate mobile terminating text messages to a mobile telephone held by the customer. Thus, by this method, a customer is only required to enter their telephone number, resulting in a charge being made to their mobile telephone account, from which it is then possible for funds to be transferred to the supplier.
A problem with relying upon the mobile telephone network to make payments is that the service provider and the seller are not actually aware of the person to whom the sale is being made. In order to achieve the transaction, it is only necessary to be aware of the actual telephone number. From a seller's perspective, advantages may be gained from knowing the identity of the purchaser, given that it is then possible to produce statistics identifying the type of customers to whom sales are being made, so that marketing activities may become more targeted.